1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile telecommunication network and, in particular, to the multipoint transmission of short message service (SMS) messages to selected multipoint destinations.
2. Description of the Related Art
The evolution of wireless communication over the past century, since Guglielmo Marconi's 1897 demonstration of radio's ability to provide continuous contact with ships sailing the English Channel, has been remarkable. Since Marconi's discovery, new wireline and wireless communication methods, services and standards have been adopted by people throughout the world. This evolution has been accelerating, particularly over the last ten years, during which the mobile radio communications industry has grown by orders of magnitude, fueled by numerous technological advances that have made portable radio equipment smaller, cheaper and more reliable. The exponential growth of mobile telephony will continue in the coming decades as well, as this wireless network interacts with and eventually overtakes the existing wireline networks.
In order to promote compatibility of the equipment and operations of various Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN), standards have been developed and are currently being implemented, e.g., the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Personal Communications System (PCS) and other standards.
With the introduction of GSM, PCS and other digital-based telecommunications systems, a number of advanced non-speech services are further provided to mobile subscribers. One such service includes a point-to-point Short Message Service (SMS), a subscriber service which operates similarly to a pager. Using an SMS message, a mobile subscriber is able to communicate text messages with another Mobile Station (MS) or an SMS terminal without establishing a circuit connection. A first mobile subscriber simply types the desired text message, e.g., up to about 160 alphanumeric characters, indicates the directory number associated with the destination mobile subscriber, and transmits the SMS message encapsulating the desired text message.
Another type of SMS messaging currently available is multipoint or cell broadcast in which a given message, e.g., traffic conditions, stock exchange information, etc., is transmitted to all active mobile phones in a particular cell. One difference between point-to-point and multipoint is that whereas reception confirmation is generally obtained in point-to-point transmissions, multipoint SMS is a one-way transmission without confirmation.
At present only the above two modes of SMS messaging are available: a message to one or all. Current SMS systems and services are unable to selectively deliver an SMS message to a subset of the available users, e.g., many in the aforementioned particular cell, such as all sales people in a company. Accordingly, there is a need for a selection mechanism so that an SMS subscriber can specify a number of other SMS subscribers to receive a given communication without having to transmit to all possible SMS subscribers.